Speakers
Description
Reliability and availability analysis is crucial at the project phase to assess if the desired requirements will be met and to determine if a new configuration, such as adding redundancy, is required. Reliability and availability analysis can be done at system, equipment and component levels. Asset managers are often conflicted about whether availability analysis should be conducted at the system level or if a more detailed approach is necessary to account for all components and failure modes. Thus, the purpose of this study is to model and compare availability at two different technical levels: equipment and components. An agent-based modelling approach is used to estimate reliability and availability of a subsea valve using software. The equipment-level approach was modeled as the baseline and treats the valve as a single unit with aggregated reliability metrics while the components-level decompose the valve into various components and assign its failure modes with associated failure rates and mean time to repair. The analysis focused on three performance indicators: operational availability, total operating hours, and the number of failure events. The results show both approaches produced similar results in terms of availability, indicating that either method can reliably predict operational readiness. However, the equipment-level approach demonstrated slightly higher total operating hours and fewer failure events compared to the component-level approach. This suggests that the components-level method provides more detailed insights into individual components, failure modes and their impact on valve’s reliability. The level of details provided by the component level can be used as an advanced decision-making tool to select appropriate components for condition monitoring efforts and inform maintenance strategies selection.
